According to a recent survey, 91% of Internet of Things (IoT) projects are Open Source based. The open source version of cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) - OpenStack, is gaining broad adoption in enterprises and service providers. OpenStack has matured from an experimental platform to a viable option for organizations. Despite its challenges and complexities, there are significant advantages. I will address a few of them here.

Scalability: OpenStack has a low-cost entry point for a private cloud that can sit securely in your data center and easily scale from a three nodes to a few thousands of nodes.

Modular Design: OpenStack is designed as a modular platform that lets you add capabilities as you need. Build only for your current requirements. You can start with individual OpenStack projects to meet your current requirements and add additional capabilities when you need them. For example, you can run OpenStack KeyStone if all you need is authentication services or for compute + Storage - OpenStack Nova (compute) and Swift (object storage) services – key elements for private cloud.

Price and Options: While one can argue that despite the low-cost for entry and OpenStack being open source - no software license fees, build and support costs are still high. I agree. However, now there are options available that allow faster build and less expensive support. Lastly, OpenStack also provides yet another viable option to build a private cloud besides Microsoft Azure and VMware vSphere.

OpenStack matters (or at least starting to matter) because it’s not just the enterprises that are adopting OpenStack for their private clouds, but many significant cloud service providers are building their public cloud platform on OpenStack. This makes it easier enterprises to create hybrid cloud models.